Show Me The . . . Math?

Statistics Gurus Are Working Their Way Into Nba Offices.

There is a small community of people with a love of mathematics and basketball but no particular loyalty to the Seattle SuperSonics who nonetheless will root for the team in the playoffs.

That's because one of theirs, Dean Oliver, has crunched the numbers for the Sonics this season. Seattle has improved from 37 victories last season to Western Conference contender this spring, and a big playoff run might cause more teams to take notice of the Ph.D. doing the math behind the scenes.

The hope for these statistic enthusiasts is that the NBA might soften some of its skepticism of their mathematical approach to evaluating players.

"Part of my goal was not just to create a position for myself," Oliver said. "It is great to do that, and I believe what I am doing is unique, but there are a lot of smart people out there doing similar things. If I can create positions for other people, that is great."

It happened in baseball.

Oakland Athletics General Manager Billy Beane's novel use of statistics was celebrated in Michael Lewis' best-selling book, Moneyball, which examined how Beane helped the small-market A's stay competitive. Beane's proteges now run the baseball operations in Toronto, Boston and Los Angeles.

Beane, inspired by the "Sabermetrics" approach of statistician Bill James, looked at existing statistics in a different way to find undervalued players. The challenge is tougher for basketball statisticians because of the differing natures of the games.

In baseball, batters and pitchers are negligibly affected by teammates, so their performances can be isolated and evaluated with a high level of certainty. Not so in basketball, where nearly everything a player does is influenced by his teammates, and some contributions are not easily quantified.

These statisticians want to know how much a player contributes to winning and express it with a single number, what Oliver calls a search for "the Holy Grail" of rating systems. He believes that's impossible because only a player's output can be measured, and that is affected by several outside variables.

That problem is why Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, whose team uses a rating system called WinVal, says it is a "valuable tool, but it's nowhere near the `Moneyball nirvana' teams are looking for."

The reason? "In basketball, there are plays on offense and defense that no one tracks," Cuban wrote in an e-mail.

Beech party

That is where 82games.com comes in. The Web site, run by Roland Beech out of his home in the San Francisco Bay Area and with contributions from other stats enthusiasts, is at the epicenter of the NBA statistics movement.

Beech and a few volunteers watch game tapes and chart every play in every game. The site contains a staggering amount of statistical data, along with related articles from Beech and contributors.

It is not enough for the 82games people to accept that a player who averages 19 points and shoots 45 percent is good. They want to know his points-per 48 minutes and his effective field-goal percentage, and they break down his shooting performance by shot type and how much time is on the shot clock.

The centerpiece of 82games is its analysis of how a team performs with a specific player on the floor, compared to how it performs with him on the bench, known as a plus/minus rating. The idea is to identify players that don't produce much in traditional statistics but help the team win in other ways.

Those unsung players rank higher in plus/minus ratings than the stars.

"It looks like [general managers] don't pay for much more than points and rebounds and a little bit of steals," said Dan Rosenbaum, creator of the DanVal rating system and also an expert on the NBA luxury tax.

Cuban said more data like those collected by 82games are needed to evaluate players. In an entry on his Web log, Cuban listed more than 30 detailed statistics the Mavericks may eventually track.

A few of them already are tracked by 82games.

"Every day we think of a new statistic we want to track," Beech said.

The hope for Beech, who already runs a financially successful football Web site, is to one day get hired by an NBA team and, like Oliver, help bring others along. But the love of basketball and numbers, not job prospects, is why the stats devotees say they started doing what they do.

Many of them connected through an Internet message board a few years back, and that led to the launch of 82games. Beech said NBA coaches and executive are among the visitors to the site, with some offering feedback.